Playing for Change

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Video games are more interactive than you might think. Hours spent gaming, enjoying, and thinking deeply about their favorite titles have led some extremely passionate players to change the way people think about gaming. And whether they mean to or not, they can even change the games themselves. Here are a few people who interacted with video games as a concept and, in so doing, changed gaming for all of us.

Curran and MacraeThe Forefathers of Modding
Pac-Man is one of the godfathers of gaming, and Ms. Pac-Man was no mere sequel. Rather, it's the result of an elaborate software modification that was stored on a circuit board and grafted to the original Pac-Man hardware.

The people responsible for this "enhancement board" were Kevin Curran and Doug Macrae. As poor college students at MIT, they founded the General Computer Corp. and, like many other game companies of the time, were promptly sued by Atariin this case for an enhancement board to Missile Command. They were legitimized almost as quickly when Atari proceeded to hire them based on the quality of their hacking work. Their image wasn't fully cemented, however, until the completion of Crazy Otto, as the duo called their Pac-hack. They were so impressed with their own work they took the possibly illegal bootleg directly into the mother ship of Namco. The Pac-Man company's American branch, sick of watching the iron cool on the Pac-Man craze while Namco Japan took its sweet time on a sequel, validated the hack with the Pac-Man license, and the rest is history.

Gooseman and CliffeModding's Special Ops
If Macrae and Curran are the forefathers of modding, Minh "Gooseman" Le and Jess Cliffe are its current presidents. Their Half-Life modification, Counter-Strike, is one of the most ubiquitous and popular games ever made, period. Valve's Steam distribution service calculates that nearly 120 million man-hours are lost to various versions of Counter-Strike monthly.

Such a statistic is even more mind-boggling considering the game's humble roots: Both Cliffe and Gooseman were college students at the time of the project's inception. As a result of all the effort that went into this mod (Gooseman spent more time on Counter-Strike than on schoolwork during his final year) and the success it enjoyed, Valve very quickly hired the duo upon graduation and made Counter-Strike one of its most famous international brands.

Patrick WildenborgSpilling Coffee
It may have been only a matter of time before somebody unlocked the hidden sex minigame in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and opened the Pandora's box of political finagling and finger-pointing that ensued. Patrick Wildenborg happened to be that somebody, and his actions, whether directly or indirectly, enraged the government, embattled a major developer, and changed the nature of game ratings.

Whether the 36-year-old Dutchman could have anticipated the fallout from the hack he performed on GTA is unknown. After a spate of speculation by the gaming public, he released a statement categorically refuting allegations by GTA publisher Rockstar that he had added any content to the game. This trained all guns on Rockstar, which had no choice but to recall and rebuild the game without the locked content. That project resulted in a massive financial loss for the company and did little to protect it from the ensuing lawsuits.

But Patrick's bit switch also greatly affected the ESRB, whose rerating of San Andreas from M for Mature to AO (for Adults Only) not only instigated the recall, but also called into question the reliability of the ratings system.

Jim Elson and YossmanPeace, Love, and Rockets
In 1996, community gaming was at a crossroads. Quake by id Software had recently been released, and its famous multi-player version was addicting gamers all over the nation. The only problem was that in 1996 the Internet was largely a dial-up affair, and though Quake had been optimized for such low-bandwidth situations, the playing experience was hardly ideal.

The fundamental disconnect between the growing closeness of the community and the difficulty of actually communicating resulted in LAN parties. These parties were typically the domain of known friends and colleagues willing to hole up in their host's basement for a weekend while connected to a hastily built network.

Then Jim Elson and Yossarian "Yossman" Holm-berg came up with an idea for Quake that was a little bit different: They put together a gathering for people from their IRC channel, in a hotel located just a few miles from the headquarters of their favorite game's developers. The name of this event was Quakecon.

Their organizing effort paid off when the entire id team visited their party to interact with the players. As a result of this and the public nature of Quakecon, attendance quickly swelled, and id's presence became more official. What started as a gathering of 30 grew to 3,000 by Quakecon 2000, and last year over 6,000 people attended the festivities. Yet another example of gamers radically influencing games.